A LOVEBIRD CALLED SUNSHINE

BY

NINA C. FULFORD

Over the years I have had many budgies. Some of them were fun and some not so much fun. It all depends on where you buy them and how they are raised. But I had never had a Lovebird before. Don�t know anything about them really. And then one night last summer a Lovebird came calling on me. She landed on my balcony late one night all frightened and forlorn.

We heard her loud little cheeps calling for help. I went out on my balcony to see what was going on. There she was in the flower pot cheeping away at full blast demanding help. I picked her up and took her inside. While my son held her and made her welcome I went and got my old budgie cage that I had not had the courage to throw out. It was almost like new. I cleaned and washed it again and found some food still in boxes, and filled the little dishes.

At first I thought that she was a budgie baby bird. She had the same kind of beak, and almost the same kind of feathers. She was almost the same size. So when I phoned the animal shelters I tried to describe her to them. But she was very hard to make out because she was very young and still had her baby feathers, but I didn�t know that.

She must have been hand raised as she was so tame. She immediately climbed into my son, Greg�s, Shirt pocket and went to sleep. Tuckered out by her fears and her flight. It took awhile to find out that she was not a budgie but a baby lovebird. And awhile more before I found out she was a little girl bird.

We have come to be great friends over the months that I have had her. We have settled on a nice routine together. She comes out of her cage for all my meals. She helps me make my breakfast, lunch and supper. And she eats off my plate whatever she wants. Of course she has her own dishes for snacks.

At breakfast time she watches me put cereal in my bowl and while I get the milk she helps herself to the dry cereal. She doesn�t like the milk so she leaves it alone. Then after my cereal I take my pills with water, which she has a sip from my glass when I am done. Then I make my coffee and put my little packet of sugar in and she goes absolutely bonkers waiting to get the empty packet to cut up. What she does is, use her beak to cut a strip of any piece of paper and tuck it into her hind end tail feathers. This is how birds carry small twigs and things to make a nest with. And only the females do this. And then only in the nesting season. But Sunshine does it all the time. And so there isn�t a piece of paper or cardboard in my house that is safe from her little beak. I think the reason she does this is because of her accident. And she is also now blind because of the same accident. I think she can see a little bit out of one eye.

Her accident came about because she had become so tame that I could take her down to the laundry room with me. And she just loved the elevator. When it went down she would fly up into the air with it and then land on my head. So one day when my son was visiting he offered to take the garbage down for me. But Sunshine was clinging to his shirt pocket, which was her favorite place to be and she wouldn�t get off. So I said, well let her go down with you, I am sure she will be allright. BIG MISTAKE!

Ten minutes later Greg came in all upset to tell me she had had an accident and to come quick. She was lying on the floor across from the elevator all bruised and battered. It seems that she had loved the ride so much that when Greg got off with her on his shoulder, she flew back in and was caught by the elevator door shutting on her head. When Greg caught the door just in time she flew out and hit the wall.

I picked her up in my hands and cradled her. Her eyes were black and blue and badly swollen. Her head had been crushed it seems. I knew that her injuries were too bad for any doctor to fix. Only God could save her now. All that night I held her against my chest and crooned to her. I fed her water by taking it in my mouth and then putting her beak in my mouth and squirting it into her beak. She drank it very well. I had found out that since lovebirds show their affection for each other by exchanging food beak to beak, I had done the same with Sunshine. I would hold water in my mouth and share it with her, and also food and other goodies. She is as clean as any human and there is nothing wrong with this. It also makes a very strong bond between you. Since you are the only mate she will have it is the least you can do for her.

At one in the morning she was still alive. So we made a bed of cotton balls in a shoe box and put her in it. I got up a couple of times in the night to give her water. The next morning I made a mush of her seeds and fed her by mouth again. Her eyes would remain terribly swollen for at least two weeks. But I carried her on my chest all that time and nursed her.

She is a plucky little thing. She knew her way around her cage by memory so when she was put back in her cage she knew where her food was and water. When I took her out she played all over me and soon made forays to the table beside my couch. I had a little ceramic box with a lid that I kept full of her seeds on the table. And lots of cardboard for her to play with and shred. She would explore her little world and then come back and snuggle up on my sweater. While her eyes healed eventually, I knew she was still blind because she no longer flew all over the place like she had before.

One of the things I missed was her little habit of playing in my kitchen drapes. She would play in the headers that make little rolls. One of her games was to lounge in these tubes on her back and yell at me to look at her and she would stare at me from the roll as if to say, " ha, look what I�m doing!"

What I didn�t miss was the damage she had done to my expensive lamp shades. One day I had been sitting reading and the shade fell on my head. I knew she played on the top of the shade and would run around the bottom of it, but I didn�t notice, (poor eyesight) was that she had chewed off all the paper that held it to the metal ring. I sewed it back on but those are not important to me any more. Her company is more important than a lampshade I can replace.

Before she had her accident I had bought her some little toys to play with. A small car 2 inches long, a plastic dumbbell also about two inches with little balls at the end. And a child�s toy elephant that had rings and buttons all over it. She would eat the wheels off the car and toss it around. The dumbbells she would pick up by the rod, toss it over her head and then run and push it along the floor. She loved little hoops and still does. She pulls them over her head and wears them around her neck. In fact she has a little swing in her cage that has little hoops at each side and she teases me by putting her head in the small hoop and then screeching so that I think she is strangling. So I go rushing over to save her and just as I get there she pulls her head out. I also gave her a button box full of buttons of all colors that she loved to play with. She is not so interested in her toys now that she can�t see them.

But she has found other ways to have fun. Her new favorite is to go under the hem of my sweaters and tops and climb up inside and wander around my body. If I sit down while she is inside a top she will soon find a warm spot and take a nap. When she is through napping she finds the neckline and climbs out to say hello and try and bite my ears. She has a very sharp beak and I must be careful of it as she does not mean to bite me but sometimes she does. When I want to put her in her cage, (where she doesn�t want to go!), I have got to use a leather glove as she does put up a good fight. Sometimes when I am eating a snack while she is out of her cage she will take her claw and gently pull down my lip so she can get her beak inside and see what I am eating, then I will let her have some from my mouth. Then she is very gentle and sweet.

I feed her a good quality seed mix, and she has millet sprays sometimes, also some peanuts if I have any. She has her greens from my plate,(peas, carrots, greenbeans, corn, and some small pieces of beef or other meat that I am eating.) She likes a bit of coffee from my mouth. She has cuttlebone and those tubes that fit over the rungs to nibble on in her cage. I don�t give her vitamins as I can not afford it but she seems to be healthy and happy without them. Sometimes when I am cutting salads up she will help herself to bits. She won�t touch lettuce. I took this as a sign that lettuce is full of poisonous insecticides that she can detect, so I don�t buy it anymore. I make coleslaw�s.

When the other lovebirds belonging to ladies in my apartment block laid eggs, she didn�t. Probably because she was still getting over the accident she had. However, she still makes the nest building moves. Not that she ever builds anything with all the paper and cardboard�s she tucks in her back end. It is funny to see her waddling around with streamers of paper sticking out between the feathers. And of course she drops them all over the place. There is paper strips now all over my apartment.

Anyone who thinks that these small animals cannot think or reason is not very observant. This small creature has shown me many times over that she not only reasons and thinks but that she can be devious, worried about me, sly, loving, and intelligent. She gets around now by echo sounding. When I walk around the kitchen she loves to walk around with me. We go for tiny strolls together with her carefully either between my feet or in front or behind me. She knows what it means when I say ,"hot, hot!" and doesn�t go near the burners while I am cooking, even though she is on the counter beside the stove where I am cutting up vegetables or meat. Unlike my budgies who loved to get right in the water, her idea of a bath is to stand on the edge of a bowl and put her beak in and toss the water back over her head. These birds really prefer a spray bath. I will take my fingers and help her by getting them wet and then flicking the water over her back. Of course the problem with that is that she now wants to dry off on my back or head.

The thing about Sunshine is that I am never sure what new trick she will get up to! For such a badly hurt little bird she is doing very well indeed. Oh, by the way; she is called Sunshine because she is all yellow with a small rosy patch on top of her head.

UPDATE ON SUNSHINE Three weeks ago my little darling laid three little eggs. The first one was a surprise to me. Then two days later another one and two days after that the last one. They were just over half an inch in size and pure white. They looked like miniature little chicken eggs. I saved two and let the other one go. She can see again and has completely gotten over her bad accident. She is beginning to explore the apartment on her own and in the morning fly's into the bedroom closet and sits on my clothes as if to say time to get dressed! Tonight I had the TV on too loud and from the bedroom where she sleeps came her insistant voice yelling at me. I turned the mute on and then there was one small little chirp as if to say, "that's better".

UPDATE #2 ON SUNSHINE Two weeks after she laid the first three eggs she laid three more! I had crochet a little sleeping basket for her from some thick wool and this time that's where she laid the 4th egg. I took that one away and the next morning there was another one in the basket. I also took that one away but the next morning there was a third one in the basket. This time I let her keep it as I felt so sorry for her. But by the third day of her spending all of her time on this egg, I felt that it was cruel to let her hope. I felt really bad about taking her last egg away but in the two weeks since she has become her old self again. Maybe she knew they would not hatch but was sitting on them just to make sure. Who knows?